William Perehudoff, a prominent abstract painter in Saskatchewan, had an early connection to the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops. He and his wife, painter Dorothy Knowles, had a cabin nearby, and Perehudoff attended workshops between 1957 and 1968. Well-known American modernist painters and the critic Clement Greenberg taught there, strongly contributing to the development of abstract painting on the Prairies. Perehudoff was already painting abstractly, and he connected in the 1962 workshop with Greenberg and the 1963 workshop with Kenneth Noland. Perehudoff was passionately concerned with colour, and thus found commonality in Noland’s work. Exposure to artists and critics of international repute, who appreciated what he was doing, made Perehudoff more ambitious and confident. Strong and self-assured, Blue Symphony embodies this confidence. Its rich, softly modulated cobalt colour field is contrasted with stripes in vibrant tones of orange, yellow and red. Placed on the diagonal and running off the edge of the canvas, these ragged-edged stripes are bold and animated.

The previous collector of this fine Perehudoff painting was Frederick Mendel, a refugee from Nazi Germany who founded Intercontinental Packers in Saskatoon, and who endowed the Mendel Art Gallery in 1960.

Included with this lot are five publications: The Mendel Collection, Saskatoon Art Centre, 1949; The Frederick S. Mendel Collection, Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1955; Eva Miller, The Mendel Collection, Mendel Art Gallery, 1964; Nancy Tousley, William Perehudoff, Mendel Art Gallery, 1994; and Karen Wilkin et al., The Optimism of Colour: William Perehudoff, A Retrospective, Mendel Art Gallery, 2010.